How to Build A Content Marketing Flywheel for Your VC Firm

When David Hornik wanted to do the unthinkable — start a blog — his partners and the firm's general counsel tried to dissuade him.

To them, the idea of VC blogging was insane.

But David defied all odds and launched the first VC blog (VentureBlog). In no time, it became a go-to resource center for helping entrepreneurs understand VCs better and build successful companies.

In Hornik's words:

"There is little question that this marketplace of ideas [the blog] was incredibly valuable to entrepreneurs. What was once a black box became a glass box."

Seeing VentureBlog's success, many venture firms couldn't help but launch their blogs, making VC content marketing a norm in the venture world. What was once considered insane became a norm.

Celebrating VentureBlog's 10th anniversary, Hornik wrote:

"No matter what we wrote about, we were the first VCs to discuss it. And entrepreneurs were clamoring for information about venture capital. Not surprisingly, the value of this conversation we were having with entrepreneurs was not lost on others in the venture industry. And soon VC blogs started popping up everywhere we turned."

It's 2022, and VC blogs haven't stopped popping.

In fact, the competition is fiercer than ever, making it harder for VCs to earn mindshare with content marketing. Notwithstanding, a few VC firms have risen above that noise.

OpenView Partners and First Round Capital fall in this category.

How so?

First Round’s organic traffic numbers are off the charts, showing a high level of brand awareness:

Search alone contributes to 29.07% of this staggering traffic:

OpenView also has enviable organic traffic:

Search contributes to 55.65% of this traffic numbers, meaning Google considers them as a trusted resource center:

Since VCs often use content marketing to build awareness, the above impressive organic traffic results prove OpenView and First Round are doing something right.

Beyond that, both venture firms have attained thought leadership positions, with sites like MassChallenge, a global network of investors, ranking their blogs among the top “53 Startup Blogs Every Founder Should Read:”

As a marketing lead in a VC firm, this should get you thinking:

"What's the common denominator in those two firms' content marketing successes? And how can I leverage that factor for my firm's success?"

The answer to that question is simple:

They have a differentiating content flywheel — an engine that separates them from other VC firms and grows on a compound basis.

As I showed in this case study, First Round is successful because they apply what I call the BEID content flywheel, meaning they:

• Build credibility with articles,
• Engage their audience with newsletters,
• Increase reach by podcasting, and
• Distribute content via social snippets and influencers.

OpenView Partners also use traces of the framework above. Amanda (Maksymiw) Jerome, their Former Senior Marketing Associate, corroborates:

"Our overall content marketing strategy has positioned OpenView as a thought leader. It wasn't one tool, one piece of content, or one event. Collectively, we have been working to share the best new ideas for senior managers of growing technology companies through our corporate blog, content site, e-newsletter, [podcast], and social media channels, and that has made an impact."

Luckily, the BEID content flywheel is actionable and replicable.

So, in this article, I'll break down how you can execute the BEID content flywheel in a manner that elevates your VC firm and increases your chances of attracting star entrepreneurs.

Setting The BEID Content Flywheel Up for Success

Before you engineer the BEID content flywheel, you need to:

1. Understand Your Target Audience and Their Journey

"Who exactly does my firm want to serve with content?"

Answering this question helped First Round succeed. Alex Topchishvii, Director of Marketing at Coinlist, explains:

"First Round has a very clear understanding of who their target audience is: new founders and brilliant individuals who are potential future founders. Every piece of content they create is tailored to the practical needs and utility of their audience. They provide information that their audience not just wants to see, but NEEDS to see."

With the steps below, your firm can clearly understand its target audience.

• Select your most important target persona. Who's that one person you want to provide value to via content? This will most likely be a founder. Assign a name to this persona and detail their demographics, background, personality, and preferred information sources.
• Identify your target persona's goals. Once you have pinpointed your persona, think about their goals. Say your persona is a founder. Their goals would include getting funded, hiring the right talent, achieving the right product-market fit, etc. Don't assume for your persona, though. Instead, speak to real-life founders to get their perspectives.
• Highlight your persona's pain points. After identifying your persona's goals, think about the pain points that can stand in their way. Once aware of these pain points, it becomes easy for you to create problem-solving content that will make you the go-to VC firm. For example, if hiring the right talent is one of your target persona's pain points, you could craft a long-form article detailing successful founders' thoughts on hiring the right talent. Doing this will earn you significant mindshare and influence your audience to trust you.
• Understand your target persona's journey stages. Armed with a great understanding of your target persona's goals and motivations, map out their journey into awareness, interest, consideration, and commitment.
• Visualize the customer journey. List the experiences in those identified stages by speaking with your portfolio founders and top influencers. Read through your win/loss reviews too. This will give you an idea of what your persona is thinking at all stages, giving your VC the chance to answer their questions and meet their needs as early as possible.

2. Determine The Size and Scale of Your Flywheel

   
   

The size of your content marketing flywheel determines the amount of effort required to set it in motion and keep it going. It also determines the likely ROI.

So while a bigger content flywheel will yield bigger results, it's best to have a flywheel size suitable for your marketing budget and overall capacity.

This is why you need to think backward and forward.

How so?

Think of your firm's history, current capacity (both in financial and human resources), and track record. Afterward, consider where your firm is headed, how content marketing strategy can propel that direction forward, and the resources needed.

3. Build A Topic Content Cluster Strategy

Highlight the topics you need to cluster your content around. These topics should be relevant to your target audience's (e.g., a founder) pain points and queries.

Doing this will help you build topical authority, give visitors a better experience, and make your overall content strategy more impactful.

Here's a guide detailing how to build a topic content cluster strategy.

4. Reduce Possible Friction by Putting Your House In Order

Friction will slow down your content flywheel.

Internally, this friction could be a lackadaisical attitude from your team, low prioritization of marketing by top stakeholders, or a lack of human resources. Externally, it could be the failure of your portfolio companies, industry-wide deterioration, or even unforeseen circumstances like the pandemic.

Fortunately, there are ways to ensure none of that hinders you from making progress.

In the case of internal friction, developing strong communication internally, hiring the right people, and nurturing your current staff is a way to go. If you don't have the capacity or time to build an in-house team from scratch, outsource to an agency or a freelancer.

How to Execute the BEID Content Flywheel

As mentioned earlier, here’s how First Round and OpenView thrive through content marketing:

• Build credibility with articles,
• Engage with newsletters,
• Increase reach with podcasts, and
• Distribute via social media, communities, and influencers.

Just like a real-life flywheel needs force to spin, those four steps are the "force" useful in helping their content flywheel spin in the right direction:

Here's how you can execute each of them.

1. Build Credibility With Articles

Crafting articles is one way to build your firm's credibility. Guerric de Ternay, European Innovation Lead, Software & Platforms at Accenture, expatiates:

"You prove your credibility by sharing thoughtful ideas. This contributes to building a name for yourself to be top-of-mind of entrepreneurs, tech journalists, and other VCs."

But merely publishing articles, albeit consistently, won't make your firm a thought leader as every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the venture world now publishes content. And so, for you to stand out, you need to craft well-thought, unique pieces.

Hear that from Guerric, who did a great job at describing the need to craft unique content as a VC firm:

"After almost 15 years of publishing free advice about the rules of the startup game, almost everything has been said. Everyone has access to some of the best startup lessons for free.

Value comes out of scarcity. To stand out, a venture capital firm would have to do things differently: solve problems that haven't been solved, talk about things nobody talks about, come with a new angle, specialize in a vertical, and nail it."

First Round and OpenView understand Guerric's point.

This is why they craft actionable, in-depth content solving specific problems for their specific audience. This level of depth is possible because industry experts or their portfolio founders mostly author their blog posts.

In the words of Jonathan Crowe, former Content Manager at OpenView Labs:

"The main things we publish are articles. About half are produced internally, and about half are coming from guests, either people in the portfolio or industry experts."

Camille Ricketts, Founding Editor of First Review, also had this to say in an interview with Flipboard:

"Instead of our content coming from the company or even a content marketer at the company, we interview people who are known, proven experts at whatever it is that they're doing, and we write the articles in such a way, without bylines, that it feels like that person is speaking to you. So that's one thing—we feel like we're borrowing credibility."

This is why founders have this to say about their content:

2. Engage With Periodic Newsletter

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 87% of B2B marketers leverage email to disseminate their content, making email the second most popular distribution channel next to social media. Another 86% use email engagement metrics such as open and click rates to judge a content piece's success.

Email is a powerful channel, and First Round and OpenView recognize this as they have periodic email newsletters dedicated to engaging their audience.

OpenView’s PLG newsletter:

First Round's biweekly newsletter:

New to email marketing? Here is a guide to direct you.

3. Increase Reach With Podcast

Podcasting is effective at expanding your reach and increasing your flywheel's speed as:

• Your busy audience can listen to podcast episodes even when they're doing something else,
• It allows you to share your stories expressly than written words would, and
• Recording a podcast episode takes less time than writing an article.

These will help you stand out faster and gain significant mindshare of your desired founders.

This article on Podcast.co sums it up:

"Podcasts can help you transform dry and heavy topics into captivating, meaningful discussion. Storytelling, anecdotes, and interesting speakers can help bring any subject to life."

First Round and OpenView use podcasting to turbocharge their flywheel.

On one hand, First Round has a podcast, In Depth, spotlighting authentic conversations on company building:

In contrast, OpenView's podcast, BUILD with Blake Barlett, features "conversations between venture capitalist Blake Bartlett [partner at OpenView] and the smartest folks in software."

And while BUILD's episodes are authentic and informative, the OpenView marketing team extends each episode's shelf life by repurposing them into blog and newsletter formats.

Take this episode, Howie Liu (Airtable) on the Future of Low-Code/No-Code.

When it first launched, the team did an intensive recap via a blog post in which they embedded the episode twice. They also shared a social post containing 3 takeaways from the episode:

As if that's not enough, they also created two more blog posts: Building a LEGO Kit, Not a Solution - Airtable's CEO on Catering to Diverse Use Cases and From Bottom Up - Airtable's Approach to Distribution and Adoption.

Best part?

Those blog posts weren't bland recap posts. Instead, they had deeper, fresh perspectives, motivating readers to listen to the episode.

Similarly, podcasting can amplify your firm's reach. You can even take that amplification one step further by tapping into content repurposing just like OpenView does. That way, you're able to create once and distribute forever.

4. Distribute Via Social Media, Influencers & Communities

Excellent content marketing doesn't stop at creating and publishing content alone. Instead, it involves ensuring your target audience actually sees your content.

I mean, what's the point of great content if your audience doesn't know it exists?

To prevent getting crickets after publishing content, you need to adopt First Round and OpenView's tactic of distributing their content on social media.

LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit are the top social channels driving traffic to First Round’s website:

For OpenView, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are their top three social channels:

But that's not all.

Both firms fuel their distribution engine by leveraging a network of influencers. Hear this from Kelvin Cain, former Director of Content Strategy at OpenView:

"We have spent the past few years building a substantial content factory that relies heavily on influencers. Our community site, OpenView Labs, features new content from influencers every week about the topics our target audience cares about, such as sales and marketing."

According to Kelvin, OpenView has gained traction from that influencer marketing strategy. In his words:

"Because we have content from a wide range of influencers, each of whom shares their content with their diverse groups of followers, we get people coming to the site who probably otherwise wouldn't. We get a steady stream of new visitors to our site every day."

First Round explores influencer marketing too. But they bolster their distribution strategy by syndicating with large publications like Business Insider, Huffington Post, and Quartz. The partnership has resulted in abridged content snippets, data references, and stories about portfolio ventures, driving traffic to First Round's website:

Regardless of which distribution strategy you choose, there will be occasions when your tweets, LinkedIn posts, or PR don't get traction. Whenever that happens, don't forget these words by Tallie Gabriel, Producer at Unthinkable Media:

"Instead of getting discouraged when a promising tweet doesn't rack up the likes and retweets, pay attention to the clicks and check how long people stay on the page after coming from social. If your post is generating strong engagement, don't worry so much about the superficial stats."

But overall, when you create navel-gazing content, engage your audience via compelling newsletters, publish refreshing podcast episodes, and distribute your unique content via socials and influencers, winning becomes inevitable. It might happen slowly, but it'll surely happen.

How to Maintain the BEID Content Flywheel

You've laid the foundation for the success of your content flywheel. You've also implemented the tactics vital to get your flywheel spinning.

Well done!

However, your job is far from complete.

Just as a piece of equipment needs frequent maintenance to function optimally, you need to maintain your firm's content flywheel for continual success.

Here's how to go about that.

1. Tinker Ways to Increase Your Content Flywheel Speed

The faster your flywheel is, the easier it is to achieve your goals. Consequently, improving your flywheel's speed is necessary, and you can accomplish this in two ways.

First, increase the flywheel's force by creating high-impact content. For example, your audience of founders will find a well-researched market study much more impactful than five short-form pieces.

Second, reduce friction by constantly reiterating your overall strategy and improving your team's quality via internal training. Refine your content strategy as you go.

2. Think Long-Term

Optimizing for only short-term, superficial gains (think: SEO rankings) rusts your flywheel. Instead of obsessing about the present, consider the end goal of your firm's marketing efforts – demand (in the form of an increase in portfolio companies or participation in your fund's events).

With that in mind, focus on nurturing relationships with your audience, so you can create that demand organically and even create a community in the process.

And while the BEID flywheel will help you with that, don't shy away from exploring other helpful tactics. Remember, the BEID content flywheel is a recommendation, not a silver bullet.

Differentiate Your VC with a Compelling Content Flywheel

With entrepreneurs having more options than ever and the VC world not as rosy as once, differentiation via content marketing has become a borderline requirement for VCs.

For best results, execute content marketing in a way that compounds positive results with less effort from you over time.

Enters the BEID content flywheel.

Like First Round and OpenView, you, too, can use the BEID content flywheel to differentiate your firm and win competitive rounds. Start by implementing the recommendations in this article and tinkering along the way.